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Teaching & Learning

Assessment Rubrics

For any given assessment, assessment rubrics are instruments that make clear to both lecturers and students what is being assessed, what is valued, and how achievement will be evaluated. This supports consistent and transparent grading. Well-designed rubrics also serve as a way of communicating to students before and after the assessment to clarify expectations when issuing the assessment brief, and provide meaningful feedback after the assessment. Rubrics are not simply tools for allocating marks, but can support informed professional judgments about the extent to which intended learning has been achieved. 

Rubrics are comprised of assessment criteria and performance standards. Assessment criteria identify what matters in the work: the qualities, dimensions or features that are relevant to the intended learning outcomes. They provide the basis on which evidence of learning is examined. Performance standards indicate how well those criteria have been achieved. They express what different levels of achievement look like, providing a conception of the quality of performance expected at each level.

Here's an example of a rubric for that most essential of Irish competencies: the ability to make a good cup of tea. It breaks the students performance in the assessment into multiple assessment criteria, all shown in the leftmost column: “tea selection,” “steeping time,” and “presentation”. These are the criteria against which judgements can be made about the quality of the student's performance. (A more complete rubric would probably also consider factors such as water temperature and, of course, the actual taste!) An associated weighting indicates the relative importance of each of the criteria for grading purposes.

For each criterion, a set of performance standards (beginning, developing, proficient, exemplary) with associated marks ranges describes what performance looks like at each level. The descriptors for each standard level may capture actions taken, skills demonstrated, or qualities evident in the tea and the process of making it. Together, they make the competency more concrete and observable, helping everyone involved understand what mastery looks like, and what they might do to move towards it.

Criteria Weight Exemplary (>70%) Proficient
(60-69%)		 Developing
(50-59%)		 Beginning
(40-49%)
Tea Selection 20% Chose a high-quality Irish tea blend that would make your Granny proud. Chose a reliable everyday tea that gets the job done. Chose an intriguingly niche artisanal blend that raised more questions than it answered. Chose an own-brand supermarket tea with mysterious origins.
Steeping Time 30% Steeped for the optimum length of time, producing a well-balanced cup with good colour, aroma, and flavour. Steeped for a reasonable length of time. Tea was pleasant and recognisably tea-like. Steeping time showed some room for improvement. Tea was either a little weak and apologetic or unnecessarily bitter and assertive. Tea bag appears to have been introduced to the water only briefly, possibly as a courtesy.
Presentation 50% Tea was presented in a clean, attractive cup and saucer, suggesting genuine care for the tea-drinking experience. Tea was presented in a clean mug appropriate for serving tea. Tea was presented in a mismatched or slightly battered mug that distracted somewhat from the experience. Tea was served in a container that was technically capable of holding liquid but not recognisably a teacup.

 

The criteria are the assignment expectations: the qualities the final work should display. The performance level descriptions instantiate those expectations at different levels of competence (Brookhart, 2018)

Identifying appropriate assessment criteria is one of the most important decisions in rubric design. Criteria should represent meaningful aspects of the intended learning rather than superficial features of task completion that are easier to observe or quantify. In other words, criteria should direct attention to the knowledge, skills, understanding, or capabilities that students are expected to demonstrate, directing attention to the achievement of intended learning outcomes.

Superficial Assessment Criteria (Examples) Meaningful Assessment Criteria (Examples)
Word count Relevance, depth and coherence of submission.
Number of references used Critical engagement with relevant literature. 
Length of report Quality of analysis and argumentation
Attendance at group meetings Effective contribution to collaborative work 
Use of minimum number of course materials Appropriate and critical application of relevant concepts
Submission of a draft Development and refinement of the work through an iterative process

The issue with the 'superficial' features detailed in this table is not so much that the things being measured are irrelevant. In some contexts, quantitative measures are entirely appropriate, and assessments may legitimately specify minimum standards or threshold requirements. The key question when selecting criteria is therefore not simply whether a feature can be measured, but whether it provides meaningful evidence of the learning or quality of performance the assessment is intended to evaluate.

Practical Tip:  Where a requirement is necessary for the assessment but does not provide meaningful evidence of the learning or quality of performance being evaluated, it may be better specified as an assessment condition or threshold requirement rather than as part of a rubric criterion. This distinguishes requirements for completing the assessment from the dimensions of quality that form the basis of the judgement of achievement.

There isn’t one universally prescribed set of performance standard for rubrics. The most important thing is that they provide a structured scale that is clearly differentiated and consistently applied across criteria. What the descriptors say at each level is generally more important than the labels you use here. The important thing being that evaluators and learners can clearly understand the described differences in quality, capability, achievement, or progression. There is no hard-and-fast rule about the number of levels you should use. Depending on your purpose and context, you might use three, five, or more (though it is best to keep things as simple as possible).

It is relatively straightforward to align performance levels with percentage ranges or grade bands. This is perhaps the most basic way of translating the judgements captured in a rubric into results that can be reconciled with your university’s grading, classification or GPA system. In the example provided above, the rubric associates each performance standard with a corresponding percentage band. This allows the descriptive language of the rubric to sit alongside the more formal language of institutional grading, providing a bridge between qualitative judgements about performance and the grades that ultimately need to be recorded and reported.

Brightspace provides a rubrics tool that enables you to define criteria and performance standards, attach descriptors to performance standards, allocate weights or points where appropriate, and apply rubrics consistently when evaluating student work. You can also use Brightspace rubrics to provide feedback to your students according to the criteria and performance standards.

TU Dublin provides its staff with a guide to Rubrics on Brightspace (MS Sway Presentation, requires login).

Here are some additional resources provided by the Brightspace developers, D2L:

The Microsoft CoPilot teaching tools can be used to generate draft rubrics based on an existing assessment. This can be a useful way to explore different possibilities for rubric type, criteria, achievement scales, performance levels, scoring, accessibility and so on. However, it is important to treat AI-generated rubrics as starting points rather than finished products. Use the tool to generate ideas, test alternatives and act as a sounding board but apply your own academic and disciplinary judgement to decide what should be assessed, what constitutes meaningful evidence of learning, and how different levels of achievement should be described. 

To create or edit assessment rubrics using Microsoft Copilot, follow these steps:

  • Open Microsoft Copilot and sign in using your TU Dublin credentials.
  • Once logged in, navigate to the 'Teaching Tools' area: In the top-left corner of the screen, locate the 'Teach' menu, which appears beneath the 'New Chat' button.
  • Select 'Teach' to access the teaching-focused tools and features.
  • From the available options, choose 'Homework and Assessments'.
  • Within the Homework and Assessments section, select 'Rubric'. You can then:
    • Create a new grading rubric for an assessment.
    • Generate rubric criteria and performance descriptors using AI assistance.
    • Edit and refine existing rubrics to align with module learning outcomes and assessment requirements.
    • Review the generated rubric before applying it to your assessment activity.

Tip: Before generating a rubric, have your assessment brief, learning outcomes, and grading criteria available. Providing this information to Copilot will help produce more relevant and accurate rubric recommendations. 

You can find a guide to the Copilot rubrics tool here. 

You should always be transparent about the use of Artificial Intelligence in your work.

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